A Colleague Killed, a Conversation Cut Short

Correspondents who covered the war in Iraq are reflecting on their time there and the official end of U.S. combat operations. James Glanz covered Iraq from 2004 to 2008.

On my last afternoon in Iraq, in December 2008, I drove to a graveyard in Baghdad to have a conversation with Khalid Hassan, who had been dead for over a year. All I could do when I got there was kneel in the dust and say, over and over, “I’m sorry.”

Sorry that a 23-year-old who worked in the Times Baghdad bureau’s newsroom was killed, brutally and pointlessly, on his way to work; sorry that I had not found a way to anticipate that horror and move him to a safer neighborhood after a bomb had destroyed his apartment and injured his sister a few months earlier; sorry that someone whose bravery and maturity I saw blossoming would never have a chance to grow up.

Death anywhere cuts short a conversation, prevents you from saying the words you wanted to say or realize later that you needed to say or should have said. Khalid must have literally skidded to a stop, as the murderers first fired automatic rifles into his beat-up Kia and then came back to shoot him in the head and neck after he survived the initial volley. He died next to a gas station after sending a final text message from the cellphone he was never without: “I’m O.K., Mom.”

That would be another conversation without a sequel.

While every Western reporter was surrounded by death in Iraq, the calculus of emotion — comparing the loss of many to the death of even one friend — places a burden on the soul. That calculus was first made plain to me in the fall of 2005 after another Times reporter and translator, Fakher Haider, was dragged out of his apartment by masked men in the southern city of Basra. He was found hours later with his hands bound, a bag over his head, bruises on his back and at least one bullet hole in his head. After Fakher’s death, several reporters, myself included, wrote appreciations of Fakher’s colorful mishmash of Arabic and English, his wry humor, his utter disdain for danger and his jean jacket that represented his attempt at Western style. What few of us could bear to mention was how tough we had to be with Fakher to get him to show up at appointments on time or file routine news feeds on events in Basra.

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The truth was that Fakher hated routine, and he showed his true skills only on the most difficult or dangerous stories, when he would nearly always come through against the odds. But part of his job was to file those routine feeds and make those routine appointments. And I, for one, was especially prone to humorlessness when Fakher would show up late, flash his rakish smile and joke, for the 20th time, that there were two kinds of time: Western time and Arabic time.

We both use these two hands to measure time, I would say, pointing to the face of my Swiss Army wristwatch, which regularly and reliably turned in Iraq like a device from another planet. Fakher would chuckle at this like some scapegrace out of Dickens, and we would go out and get the story.

Now I would like to apologize to Fakher for the truly unforgivable sin of humorlessness in a war zone and — for at least parts of our time together — a lack of appreciation for the way that Fakher risked his life every day on both routine and extraordinary assignments.

That conversation, too, is over. The last time I saw Fakher, we were standing in beating sunlight on a 110-degree day with a septuagenarian sheik in full tribal garb. The sheik had provided roughly eight men with AK-47s to protect me on a reporting trip with Fakher to the dangerous southern marshes. It cost me around $500.

Fakher had to explain to the sheik that we needed a receipt — the Arabic word is wassil — for the eight armed men so that my office in New York would reimburse me for the expense. With a disbelieving look on his wizened, tobacco-stained face, the sheik signed a receipt.

When Khalid died, many of us wrote about his rotund frame, his usually jovial demeanor and the idiomatic English he honed by watching DVDs of shows like “Sex and the City” and Wesley Snipes films. Khalid had a difficult, off-color side that many of us handled with great impatience and little indulgence for a young man trying to come of age in a shattered country as he acted as his extended family’s primary breadwinner.

I remember being mortified one day as Khalid and I waited in some ministry office and he explained to me in a loud voice how one says “nice behind” in Iraqi Arabic. The expression is untranslatable in a family newspaper.

Flash to another day when roughly a dozen suspected members of a Shiite militia had bloodied the groundskeeper for the Times’s Baghdad bureau and were attempting to take him away to his likely death. Khalid hurried outside the walls of the compound with me and a Western security adviser to talk to the angry men. The militiamen punched, grabbed and shoved Khalid, a Sunni, but he stood his ground, speaking rapid-fire Arabic and English, and somehow we got the groundskeeper back inside the walls.

As we walked back inside, I told Khalid that I was proud of him, and he said with great dignity, “I don’t like to see anyone taken advantage of.”

A few months before he died, a car bomb destroyed the apartment he shared with his family in the deadly neighborhood of Saidiya. After working out some details with New York, a colleague and I took Khalid into an office and told him that the paper would provide some extra support so that he could rebuild his family’s life. He teared up and kissed me on both cheeks in the Arabic way. It was one of my proudest moments as a professional. In retrospect, though, I wish I had persuaded him to move entirely out of Saidiya, rather than let him stick it out like the stubborn young achiever that he was. On the morning he was killed, Khalid sent a cellphone text message to the newsroom manager, Ali Adeeb. “My area is blocked,” he texted Ali, who has since left Iraq and moved to the United States. “I am trying to find a way out.”

He never did. When Khalid died, Ali wrote me today, a larger conversation ended. It was a hopeful conversation “that one day we can actually live normally in Baghdad and enjoy small things in life just like Khalid was doing,” Ali said.

As the American battle ends in Iraq, there are surely new narratives, new conversations, waiting for a country struggling with the devastation of a dictatorship, an invasion, a sectarian war and dreams of a better future. But for Khalid and Fakher and so many others, we leave behind dust, regret and loss, and no words to efface them.

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At War is a reported blog from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other conflicts in the post-9/11 era. The New York Times's award-winning team provides insight — and answers questions — about combatants on the faultlines, and civilians caught in the middle.

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Remembering a Fallen Colleague

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